Friends Don't Let Friends Listen to Corporate Rock

Abstract

This article examines punk subculture's methods of commercially independent cultural production. While previous scholarship on punk and other youth cultures concludes that resistance is to be found in fashion, style, and symbolic gestures, the author locates dissent in the act of producing music and media that are relatively autonomous from the corporate culture industry, which in punk subcultures is known as the “do-it-yourself ethic.” Pierre Bourdieu's theory of “the field of cultural production” is used to explain how cultural producers are motivated to create and perform independently of the commercial marketplace. The findings are based on years of participant-observation and in-depth interviewing within punk subcultures in the Southern California region.